The study comes on the back of the Invisible Gorilla phenomena, sparked by a book of the same name, which examined human perception and "inattentional blindness".

For the research, psychologists Dr Daniel Simons and Dr Christopher Chabris asked study participants to watch a fast-paced video in which a group of people pass a basketball and to count how many times certain people tossed the ball. Actually, you try it (watch the video below).

Did you notice the gorilla in the room? In the middle of the video, a person in a gorilla suit walks into the frame--a seemingly obvious intrusion that was noticed by only about half of the participants in Dr. Simons' study. It wasn't that the participants weren't paying attention but their selective attention had caused inattentional blindness.

"We all love these quirks of human perception. It's entertaining to know that our senses can play tricks on us. And there's no doubt the extent of most people's familiarity with this psychological phenomenon."

He adds: "But what if this perceptual quirk has serious implications - even life threatening implications?"

Drew does not see it as necessarily bleak news however, pointing out to CBS in a further email interview: "Radiologists are amazingly good at finding cancer, but that does not mean they see everything.

"One reason that they are so good at detecting cancer might be that they are really tightly focusing their attention on the task at hand. The consequence of focusing your attention really tightly is that you may be prone to missing things which may be pretty obvious in retrospect."